Thursday, July 10, 2014

“The word on the street is that the screwball is hard on the arm,” says Don Cooper, Chicago’s pitching coach. “But listen, there’s no documentation on that. Maybe that’s why a lot of people don’t throw it, but I believe no pitch is any more dangerous than any other if you have a good delivery. If you have a bad delivery, every pitch is freakin’ dangerous.”

Among baseball lifers, though, Cooper’s is decidedly a minority opinion. Lurid stories about the pitch are commonplace. “We’d be on the bus and see a guy out the window whose arm was turned out,” McCarver said, “and we’d say: ‘Yup. Old screwballer.’ ”

Jerry Dipoto, the Angels’ general manager, told me that Carl Hubbell used to visit the Giants’ training camp after his retirement. “Legend has it he’d walk in and his arm was backward,” he said. “He couldn’t get it to come back around to the appropriate position because of all the years of pronating from throwing the pitch.”

Just how a screwball causes injury was open to debate. “Too hard on the shoulder,” insisted Arizona’s manager, Kirk Gibson. “The elbow,” said the former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda. Even Santiago acknowledged the possibility: “They told me it’s bad for my wrist.” He keeps throwing the pitch, he said, “because you don’t hear much about pitchers hurting their wrists.”

Never mind all those pitchers who kept using it into their late 30s and 40s, or that Valenzuela, at 53, maintains he can throw it today. When I spoke to players and coaches about the screwball, the expectation of certain injury was never far from the conversation.

Reader Comments and Retorts

Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.

Mike Marshall lived on the screwball and blew out after he pitched over 200 innings in his Cy Young season; is that how the "screwball hurts your arm" meme got started? It doesn't hold up, anyway; the wrist gets twisted a similar way by a lot of variations on the cutter, which many pitchers throw.

Anyway, I'm not sure the screwball has actually gone anywhere; they just call it the circle change now. A fair number of pitchers have a slow pitch that breaks in on the same-side hitter.

It seems to me the change up and to a lesser extent the splitter have replaced the screwball as a "backwards" pitch. Those pitches as they are thrown today seem to have arm side movement and while maybe not as much as a scroogie those are easier pitches to teach.

#2 No. It goes back as far as Jack Coombs and Christy Mathewson. Mathewson's fadeway was probably a screwball and he saved the pitch for emergencies because it took so much out of him (and hurt to throw)

Jack Coombs strongly advised against teaching young pitchers the screwball saying, "it calls for muscle movements in the wrist, forearm, and elbow that are contrary to the laws of nature."

And Hubbell washed out with the Tigers because Ty Cobb wouldn't let him throw his screwball. Afraid it would hurt his arm.

Hubbell was reportedly disfigured due to his use of the screwgie. His section in the Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers features the quote "the only eccentric thing about [Hubbell] is his left arm. He looks as if he put it on in the dark."

I don't have a copy right now, but it also goes into the decline of the screwball. I think they blame the increasing popularity of the circle change (which has a similar motion without the arm twisting), but it's been a while since I read it.